The Runaways
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: Months after the end of the war, Dryden Fassa commands a relief expedition to the Duchy of Freid, taking on an unexpected passenger.


_Escaflowne copyright to Sunrise, Bandai Visual, and TV Tokyo.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission._

* * *

**The Runaways**

She was standing by the tall windows when Dryden came in quietly through the door to the visitor's lounge. Draped in a powder-blue gown, her back to him, the late afternoon sun streaming through the glass, reflecting off the mirrored walls and rising up from the surface of the harbor water, he could almost believe she was Millerna. Almost, because even through the halo of light he could see the proportions were slightly off, the skin a little too tan, the arms a little too thin, the hair a little too straight and fine and colorless. If she had heard his footsteps in the entryway, she gave no indication.

"I was told I have a visitor?" he said softly, hoping he didn't sound too wary. He'd heard the rumors, of course, but rumors were rumors, and Dryden was too pragmatic to bear credence to whisperings of people who knew nothing about the war.

She turned, and he was struck by how thin she was, cheeks hollow and sunken in that ragged, boyish face, but the blue eyes were hard. Perhaps he'd given himself away, maybe by some twitch of an eyebrow, an invisible shrug of the shoulder, because she looked away.

"Hello, Dryden," she said.

He took two steps further into the room, saw the effort it took for her not to back into the glass window as if to escape from him, and stopped. "It's nice to see you again," he offered.

For a second he thought he saw a twitching of her lips, as if she was struggling to smile but had forgotten how. "I heard you were setting sail for Freid today," she told the window instead.

Dryden looked at her consideringly. "This is true," he said. "I never keep my routes or schedule secret from your brother if he asks. The refugees need supplies."

Her hands spasmed at her side as he said the word _brother_, and he noticed but said nothing. She was not wearing gloves, he realized as he glanced discreetly at her again. Millerna had always worn gloves, floating dresses like airy clouds. This gloveless girl wore the long dress around her like a shield.

"Madam," he said to her, "I appreciate you coming to wish us fair winds and good fortune on our voyage, but the hour is drawing near and the cargo is loaded, the ground crews are off, and the sails are full. I regret I must depart shortly. Do you have a place to stay or are you journeying back to the capital tonight? The roads are dangerous still. I would provide you with an escort-"

Her head snapped up. "I need no escort," she snarled at him, and he narrowly avoided taking one step back at the hardness of those blue eyes. "I will be accompanying you."

"I'm sorry, madam," he managed through his surprise. There was very little that could surprise him nowadays, but apparently it was one thing he still hadn't grown out of. "That isn't quite possible-"

"You're master of this expedition, aren't you?" she retorted, fists clenched. "Anything is possible if you wish it! I'm going with you."

He stared at her, wondering what was lurking behind those wide eyes, that thin face. He had seen eyes like that before - Van Fanel's, Allen Schezar's, all those soldiers that had died for Asturia, charging into battle with hardened eyes.

"Does Allen know you're here?" he asked softly, half afraid she wouldn't answer, or would lie.

One muscle spasmed in her cheek, but she did not look away. "No," she said. "He does not."

Waves crashed through the open window and he heard the cry of seagulls, the rumble of heavy machinery outside on the docks, the whine of engines, familiar sounds to which he'd fallen asleep every night for as long as he could remember. He had prayed, as much as Dryden Fassa ever prayed, that those sounds would still be here when he returned from the war.

It was important that even he had something to come back to.

"It will be a long journey," he said. "Freid is some days away, and we will be not only be dropping off and picking up supplies, but we must remain long enough to calculate the amount needed by the refugees for the coming months."

"I understand," she said quietly.

"The weather is unpredictable this time of year. There are storms in this part of the hemisphere, and air travel, as you should know, is never completely safe even under the best of circumstances."

"I understand," she said again.

"Then understand also that I take no responsibility for you, and I will not be bound to answer to your brother when he sends search vessels to interrogate me on your whereabouts."

"I will answer to my brother," she said coldly, fingers clutching at the edges of her dress. "I am no man's responsibility."

He took a deep breath, did not think, just acted, clapped his hands together, and said, "Good."

The thin face tightened and blue eyes narrowed.

He waved one hand in the air casually. "As long as I'm not your keeper, you're free to do as you please. We do take boarders along with us on the voyage, as long as you've got the money to pay for a bunk."

"That," she said almost too softly for him to hear, "is the one thing I do have."

"Excellent!" he said, giving her a cheerful smile and jerking one hand at the door behind him. "We're about ready to leave, as I said, so I'll just show you to the assistant manager here and he'll get you settled in. I'm not sure what kind of private bunks we have, and sometimes we take on some...unsightly types."

She favored him with an unreadable look. "I'll make do."

"I'm glad to hear it," he told her, noting again the way the sunlight flashed through her silver hair like ghostly shadows and disappeared into the hollows of her face. The horn of a ship sounded through the open window and the curtains rustled slightly. He breathed in deeply the familiar smell of sea salt and ocean spray, aware that they were standing there silently in that large, empty room, aware that there were thoughts bubbling up under the lid he had slapped on the surface of his mind so that they would not come out until he was ready.

He thought of Millerna and how this girl standing in front of him was almost her.

"If you're ready, Miss...?" he said questioningly, not quite sure how to address this shadow in the powder-blue dress, not quite sure if the blankness behind those hard blue eyes would care.

"My name is Dilandau," she said.

The assistant manager found her a private bunk on the second deck of the main flagship after Dryden had taken him aside discreetly and pointed out to him that it would not be wise to have a young woman wandering into a public bunk filled with Asturian workers.

"If you ask me," the manager told him skeptically, "she doesn't seem quite right to me. Touched in the head. It's those eyes, maybe. Wouldn't give me a name, just told me to put down whatever I liked. A bit creepy, you know?"

"I didn't ask you," Dryden said, and left him to go check on the altitude gauges.

He returned to the helm for takeoff, feeling that familiar shudder of excitement he had once craved as the mighty ship heaved beneath him and rose from the surface of the water, towering ocean spray blindingly beautiful in the pink and blue and purple of Asturia's sunset. A flock of migrating birds passed over the surface of the enormous sun, black spots in the red sky, and the engines thrummed under his feet with comfortable mechanical precision.

She was leaning against the wall of a side corridor outside the door of the bridge as he exited, so quiet that he almost started again when he noticed her. She had changed her dress to a simple white, but still wore no gloves, blending into the steel grey panels like a trick of the light.

"If you'd like," he said without preamble, "I can take you in with me next time I go onto the bridge. You know something about flying, don't you?"

"I'm afraid of heights," she said.

Dryden blinked. "Oh."

A moment of silence. "Thank you," she finally said, sounding like the words had been dug out from some dusty corner of her memory, laid on the ground like dead things.

"You're welcome," he said gently. The ship hummed and he suddenly was aware that he was a man and she a woman, and the two of them alone.

_Millerna_, he thought, _what should I do now?_

"I'm running away, you know," the girl said conversationally, as if mentioning a casual detail, some oversight.

"Yes," he told her. "I figured out that much."

He waited for her to say something else, but she didn't, leaning against the wall in the thin white dress that clung to what should have been a woman's curves but instead seemed strange, too bony, too angular, even with the wide hips and swell of breasts from the corner of his eye. As she raised one hand to brush at a strand of long hair, he realized that even her movements were jerky, unnatural, slow and cautious like some invalid relearning how to walk.

"Those clothes don't suit you," he said.

After a moment of strained silence, she said, "I know."

"There's a man on board with the crew," he began casually, "an ex-Zaibach citizen." When she made no indication she heard him, he went on, "He lost his farm years ago to the government when they burned it to make room for factory expansion. He fled with his family to Asturia, but one of his boys disappeared crossing the border."

"I don't care about your sobstories, Dryden," she snapped.

"I'm almost done," he continued. "He told me later on he'd heard rumors of a Zaibach Guymelef pilot bearing his boy's name, but he was never sure. He never dared to ask. He knew what the fate of all Zaibach soldiers were, sooner or later, so he didn't allow himself to hope, so he wouldn't grieve when he lost his son again."

She made an unintelligible sound, something between a snarl and a sob caught in her throat.

"I just wanted to let you know," he said. "That's all."

He heard a low laugh. "You liar," she whispered.

"I don't lie, madam," he replied, not quite trusting himself to speak the name by which she called herself. "That might be the only thing that I can be proud of."

"I don't suppose," she said, pushing off the wall and fixing her hard gaze on him, "he told you his son's name?"

Strangely, he felt a surge of emotion well up from the closed-up places of his heart, perhaps pity for the shell of a girl standing there before him, perhaps anger at the war that had destroyed them all. "His son's name was Shesta."

They made good time the next day and the day after, and the weather held steady. Dryden woke in the morning to the sunlight streaming through his slatted window shutters, made his way to the mess to find the crew in good spirits and the food tolerable. The helmsman was a new recruit, someone he'd taken on recommendation at the last port before Asturia three weeks ago, and he stayed long enough to make sure of the course headings before heading to the office.

He saw the girl several times throughout the next few days, once pushing a cart of what looked like scrap metal through one of the connecting bays, twice wearing an apron with a tray of boxed lunches balanced precariously on her shoulder. He would stop, raise one hand, open his mouth to speak, but she did not seem to see him. There was something different about her too, but he couldn't put a finger on what it was, spent some time mulling it over until someone would stick his head in and remind him that the figures were due in half an hour, or that the wind had shifted and they were getting a northeasterly now.

He was not that naive to assume that she had simply not noticed him standing there, because soldiers like her - soldiers as deadly and ruthless and gifted as she was - did not simply forget.

"You'll never believe how good the new kid's fitting in," said his assistant manager, the fifteenth person to stick his head inside the door in the past hour. Dryden had kept idle count in a tally chart on one corner of his accounting book. "Ran errands from the kitchen to the boys down in the hangars, gave us a hand with some heavy lifting too. Strong for all she seems to be skin and bones tripping over her own two feet, and a girl at that." The small man hesitated. "It's a girl, right?"

Dryden realized then that the reason he'd thought something had changed about her was that she had been wearing men's clothing.

"Oh," he said, "definitely a girl."

He spent the rest of the evening of the third day closing out the accounts for Freid, made a short journal entry on the state of the ship's rations, shoved the books in a drawer and locked them, leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk to stare out the small windows lining the small office crammed full of his half-finished experiments and dusty telescopes and old scientific texts. The smell of dinner, roasted meats and hot soup, drifted through the open doorway, and he could see the beginnings of clouds on the horizon, dusty pink with the twilight.

"There's a storm coming," he said aloud.

"That's what your weatherman said this afternoon," came the reply from the door.

He didn't turn his chair, didn't drop his feet down back to the floor. "I hear you've been a great help to my crew over the past few days," he said instead. "Thanks."

"They needed an extra hand," she said dryly. "I helped them. It's something people do from time to time."

"Indeed," Dryden said. "Not something you learned from Zaibach, I assume?"

Silence. His father used to say that his tongue would be the death of him, but Dryden had always believed that sometimes, things had to be said, and to not speak at those times would be letting a critical moment slip by, never to be recovered. He held his breath for a brief moment, wondering if this girl believed that also, or if he had read her wrong and his father had been right after all.

Her slow footfall on the plush, heavy carpet was the only reply, moving around his desk to where he sat watching the stars appear one by one in the purple-black night sky. She materialized out of the dark like a phantom, long silver hair bound at the nape of her neck, loose white shirt open at the collar, pale skin.

"Aren't you going to ask why I ran away?" she whispered at last.

Dryden forced his gaze away from those haunted blue eyes, staring fixedly out the window at the clouds. "I'm not the sort of man who forces himself into the business of other people's lives," he said. "I have a great respect for your brother, and I am content to think that anything between the two of you is your own affair."

"Always my brother," she said. "All that matters about me is Allen, isn't it?" Her voice was flat, emotionless. He did not dare glance at her. "There are stories about me in Asturia. People wonder where I've been for the last ten years. They say all kinds of things about me. That I was a servant in the Zaibach palace, that I've been wandering in the forest, living with wolves, that my father kidnapped me, that I ran away out of spite because I hated Asturia. I was five years old, Dryden. Five!"

He leaned his head back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. He caught an awkward movement out of the corner of his eye, her hand reaching back to touch her hair in a slow, uneven motion like she wasn't sure that the arm was hers. "And what did you say to those rumors?"

"What could I say?" she retorted. "I said nothing! Allen said nothing! What could we tell them? The truth?"

"Millerna always said that the best weapon anyone could have was the truth. In your case, though, I might agree with you that it wasn't the best option."

"It wasn't an option," she said hoarsely, putting out a shaking hand to steady herself on the side of the desk. "For the first few months I lived in a constant nightmare, and not just at night - waking dreams, when I was going about the day, eating dinner, taking baths, at the oddest times - I'd see things. I'd wake myself up at night screaming. I saw people dying over and over. Sometimes I killed them, sometimes they were trying to kill me. Sometimes the dreams made no sense, dismembered heads, pools of blood, horrible flashing colors."

Dryden took a deep breath, let it out, took his feet off the desk. He still did not look at her.

"I had to relearn how to walk," she said. "I had to relearn how to hold things...sometimes I'd be sitting there holding a knife or a spoon and my fingers would just freeze and it would slip out of my hand. Once I was holding a vase, a family heirloom from my great-great-great-grandfather, and the whole thing fell through my fingers and smashed."

"Why are you telling me this?" he said.

She gave a low, bitter laugh. "Why? I don't really know. Back when-" she stopped. "Back...then, I remember I had nightmares, but not like this, and _they_ were there. When I screamed for help, they weren't afraid. I remember I threw Shesta against the wall once and broke his shoulder, but even then he didn't blame me." Fingers tightened against the desk. "I don't remember if I felt bad about that or not."

"It's understandable," Dryden said. He thought of this girl alone in a grand Asturian bedroom, screaming in the dark, with no one listening.

"Millerna was a great help. The first month when I thought I was going crazy, she helped me. A few times I tried to kill her too, grabbing anything within reach and smashing her with it - the lamp, candlesticks, books. Allen was away, so she was the only one who dared come near me, and that's how I repaid it."

Dryden winced. "I gather she survived."

"Oh yes," the girl said. "It got better after the first month. The waking dreams went away, mostly. I still get the nightmares, but not as much. Millerna would tell me stories about her husband, the merchant who could go anywhere he wanted anytime on his flying machine. The stories gave me a terrible ache, you know. I was like that, once."

He shook his head. "No, you weren't. The empire called, and you went. Folken Fanel called, and you went. Even I know that much. Don't tell me it was your own choice."

She gave him a shadowy smile. "Don't rob me of my own glorified memories, Dryden. I have little enough left as it is."

"War is ugly, madam," he said. "It robs all of us. And Millerna was wrong. I'm no longer her husband. I lost my right to bear that title around the same time the war ended."

The look she gave him was unreadable in the dim glow of the fading sunset. "Then why do you keep sending her your flight schedules?"

He blinked.

"I didn't hear about your scheduled departure for Freid from Allen," she said, and pushed herself off the desk, swaying a bit on her feet, fumbling for the desk again and turning in a clumsy circle to face the door. "By the way, dinner is served."

"You never told me why you ran away," Dryden called after her.

The footsteps stopped, and then she said, "You never asked."

He sat there gazing out at the stars after the sound of her boots had faded, gazing without really seeing, and then his stomach protested so he swung himself out of the overstuffed leather chair and went to dinner.

The rain began the next day, a slow drizzle in the middle of the night that woke him in fits and starts until the next morning when he got up to a grey sky and a steady drumming on the windows.

"As far as we can tell, the wind's not got up more than what we usually handle in a regular day's flight," the helmsman told him as he headed groggily to the bridge for a report. "We might have to take in some canvas, but levistones are holding steady and we've got an around the clock crew on bail duty just in case."

He told the navigator, who had been there all night, to get some rest, called the assistant up to the bridge, stuck around for the morning report, and then left for breakfast. The girl was there in the kitchen, wearing a smudged apron over her man's clothes as she ladled porridge into bowls, tossed chunks of bread onto trays. Dryden watched from the doorway and realized that his men were giving her friendly smiles, but none were making the usual advances, not even a wink or a nudge, and then he watched her smile back at them with a smile that did not touch those hard blue eyes.

"Good morning," he said, grabbing a tray at the end of the line.

"Your weatherman was right again," she told him without preamble, "and I think he'll continue to be. Heavy storms by afternoon, he said."

"We've been through these before," Dryden said smoothly. "No reason to believe this time is any different." He hesitated. "Are you sure you don't want to come up with me to the bridge sometime today?"

She paused in mid-ladle, opened her mouth and then shut it with an audible, angry click of teeth. "You're holding up the line," she snapped.

The mess tables were all full, so he took his tray and his musings to a corner booth and ate his breakfast while staring thoughtfully at nothing. He did not have to look up to see who the pair of scuffed black boots belonged to as a bowl of porridge found its way onto the table facing him.

"Why do you trust me so much?" she said to him.

He looked up at her as she stood there, clutching the table again with white-knuckled fingers, and smiled. "Why shouldn't it?"

"I killed thousands of your people," she said. "I tried to kill my own brother, I led a witchhunt through Fanelia. How do you know I'm safe?"

"Millerna trusts you," Dryden said. "And therefore so do I. What's done is done."

She stared at him.

"Now, if you were to go on a slaughter spree through my ship," he continued, "I wouldn't have any qualms about throwing you out the nearest porthole. But I don't think you're the type to do that, at least not anymore."

For a moment he thought she was going to throw her spoon at him, but instead she growled and threw herself down on the bench opposite him, attacking her porridge with venom.

"Let it go," Dryden advised. "Zaibach is dead."

Her eyes as she looked back up at him were haunted. "That's why I can't let it go," she whispered. "Everyone's dead, and I'm the only one left."

A few phrases of the comforting sort slid through his mind, but he did not say them, knew that to say them would only be giving her pity that she didn't need. He wondered how Millerna would handle this. He wondered how she did handle it when she sat by the girl's bed at night that first month, trying to save her, because Millerna was a healer and too stubborn to back down from something like this. A challenge, she would have called it.

"That sort of thinking, madam, will leave you back where you were six months ago," he said to her, sliding out of the seat with his tray. "You know as well as I do that there's no magic spell to erase everything that happened, but you can either sit there and feel sorry for yourself, or you can make yourself useful, for example by coming up to the bridge with me."

Her hands tightened on her bowl and he braced himself for an outburst and porridge in the face, was almost shocked when instead she just said tightly, "No thank you. I promised to help the crew in the bay with the melefs today."

"I see," Dryden said, smiling at the top of her head, wondering if this time he had indeed gone too far with his big mouth. "Then I'll see you later."

No answer.

He stopped by his office to make sure the papers for the day were in order, then made his way back up to the bridge, feeling the floor sway under his feet as the first stormwinds rushed in. "Are the ropes holding?" he demanded. "Is it raining yet?"

"No rain yet," the helmsman reported, and the burly navigator added, "I've got reports from the crews that there hasn't been enough strain to really test the ropes." He frowned at the sky outside. "But that's only a matter of time, I suppose."

"We hit worse than this on the last crossing from Fanelia coming home, and everything was fine," Dryden said. "Let's not make all news bad news."

"Whatever kind of news, that patch of black cloud up ahead worries me," the navigator said.

"Well," Dryden said, "Best to warn the crews what we're coming up on. Send runners to the bays and make sure everything's tied down double tight. The melef bay might need some extra help. I think they were planning to work today."

"Right away, sir," said the man by the starboard controls., motioning to another tech and heading towards the exit. Dryden lowered himself into the captain's chair as the door hissed open, heard a pause.

"Can I help you?" said the first tech.

"I'm here to see Dryden," the voice said, and he turned around just in time to see her step through the doorway, shirt and face stained with grease. "The bad weather's on its way, and the crew down in the melef bay is wondering if we have any extra tie-downs."

"Get them some tie-downs," Dryden said to the tech, and to the girl he said, "You stay here."

"I'm not one of your men," she retorted.

"I know," he said, "and that's why I need you to stay." When she hesitated, he said, "Please."

"Millerna was right about you," she said, stalking into the room and coming to a halt by his chair as a particularly violent gust of wind sent the ship buffeting. Dryden grabbed her arm as she scrabbled for a handhold on the chair back, releasing her as the turbulence subsided. She glared at him. "She said you were a selfish manipulator who won't stop at anything to get his way."

He gave a mental sigh. "I don't expect anything more from her," he said mildly. The ship shuddered again, but he was holding onto his armrests this time, and she had a firm grip on the back of the chair.

"She also said," she continued, "you were very kind."

He raised an eyebrow at that one, but before he could reply, the helmsman called out once, sharply, "Brace!"

He could feel her fingers digging into the back of his head from her deathgrip on the headrest, but there was no helping it now, nowhere for her to go as the lightning strikes loomed large and dazzlingly white through the viewport. The hairs on his neck and the backs of his arms tingled with the electricity in the air.

There was a giant thunderclap and the rain began to fall.

Dryden wasn't quite what happened next, whether the ship was just too slow to respond or if the helmsman had somehow miscalculated the turn a few milliseconds too late, or if it was fate. All he heard was a loud snapping sound, the moaning of the wind and the thud of people falling across the deck, cries of sudden pain. The ship whipped around and he realized it too late, as his head swung back against the hardwood of the chair, cracking with a force that made his teeth rattle. Through the black spots in his vision, he thought he saw the ship's wheel spinning wildly.

"Man down!" someone shouted, and someone else, "Ware the helm!" and then he wasn't quite sure if it was real or if he was dreaming, but there was someone crawling across the floor on hands and knees, thin arms reaching up to snatch the wheel out of its death-spin, a shout of pain, a spatter of blood.

"Let that wheel go, miss!" he heard the navigator shout, a touch of panic in that normally steady voice. "You'll get yourself killed!"

"And who's going to fly this damned ship if I do that?" she shot back. The ship yawed screaming to port as she spun the wheel with the deft hands of a pilot. Dryden smiled, put one hand to his temple as his head began to throb.

"Let her fly," he ordered. Another lighting bolt lit the sky and she spun the wheel again, dipping them up and out. Metal toolboxes screeched across the deck, slamming into the far wall. "I trust her."

"Then I suggest you all find a handhold," she barked. "I'm taking this thing up through the weather pattern."

"The levistones aren't equipped to handle that altitude!" someone protested. "These are strictly for low-level cruising only!"

She pointed one accusing finger out the window at the black clouds blanketing the horizon that were now barely visible under the curtain of rain. "It's either that, or lose ourselves in this storm! The instruments aren't working, are they, navigator?"

"How did you know?" the burly man said incredulously.

She didn't answer, simply stared into the rain as if gauging something, and then with a sharp intake of breath, slammed the entire wheel downward.

The toolboxes rattled, slammed into the back of the bridge. Something splintered. There was a weight pressing down on his chest, Dryden thought fuzzily, only he couldn't quite see anything there. The ship moaned through the wind and he saw another lightning bolt pass perilously close to what should be the left wing, heard the thunder crash around them.

"We've lost the port engines!"

She did not answer, her whole body straining against the ship's wheel, head thrown forward in an unconscious gesture. Only her arms moved, the ship's wheel like an extension of herself, and Dryden suddenly saw the image of her seated in a melef's cockpit, soaring to the sky.

It was a few seconds later that he realized something felt different, then a few seconds after that before he realized that the rain had stopped, and it was just very grey.

"Damage report!" he said hoarsely.

"One of the levistones is damaged," said one of the techs across the bay, clinging to his instrument panel. "And the port engine is gone - we can glide while we try to get it working again, but no guarantees."

"How are we on fuel?"

"Lightning barely missed the portside fueltanks. It's a miracle nothing else was seriously damaged."

The girl gave a small shudder and he looked over at her, wanting to say something and not knowing what, and then was saved the ignobility of a reply when her hands released the wheel and she fell backwards, landing in a small heap on the floor as he pushed himself out of his chair and to her side.

"That was stupid," he said to her and was rewarded with a slight smile. There was blood on her left temple and he motioned to someone for a cloth, something to wipe the blood away. He heard a tearing sound and looked up to see his navigator handing him a strip of fabric from his overgarment.

"Anyone could have done it," she said.

"But no one had the guts," the burly man said, paused. "My son was a melef pilot, in the war. Watching you, I..."

She looked at Dryden. He tightened the bandage around her head, said nothing.

"I'm sure your son was very brave," she said softly. "They were all very brave."

They crossed the border into Freid that night, and he tumbled out of bed at dawn to make his way up to the bridge and receive the morning report early. The engine had been rigged as best as could be without the proper machinery or supplies, and contact had been made with a Freid patrol ship early this morning for a tug. "They said they'd be back around midday," said the tech. The injured helmsman was back at his post, a bandage across his forehead where he had gashed it by falling across the deck.

Dryden left the bridge to check on the cargo unloading preparations and found her leaning over the rail in the melef hangar. She looked over as he entered, but said nothing as he found a spot on the rail next to her, looking down into the almost empty, cavernous space.

"We'll dock at Freid by evening," he said. "Will you stay with us?"

She gave him a long, considering glance. "I don't know," she said.

"Duke Chid will be glad to see you," Dryden said, "if you'd like to accept his hospitality. Either way, you will have friends."

She picked at a paint fleck on the metal with one restless finger. "When that man yesterday spoke about his son-" she stopped. He waited, but she did not continue, so he said, "He doesn't talk about his son often."

"No," she said, "I'm sure it's not something he likes to talk about."

He smiled. "All of us have things like that. Secrets. I've found it's a little easier to bear when that secret is shared with someone else, in the end."

"Millerna said also that you were loyal."

"Kind and loyal," he mused. "Perhaps she doesn't loathe me as much as I thought."

"You know, Dryden," she said, pushing herself off the railing. There was a fresh bandage across her forehead, and she had on a newly pressed shirt, but her boots were still scuffed. "We're the same, you and I."

He raised an eyebrow. "You think so?"

"We're both trying to prove something. It's not something that we've spent our whole lives trying to prove, because we never knew it existed before." She drew a deep breath, staring down at the melefs again, and her fingers moved slightly on the railing. "If the war hadn't ended, maybe we would have never known it existed."

"Is that why you ran away?"

She only smiled slightly.

"I think they need you in the cargo bay," Dryden said. "They're getting ready to transfer some of the cargo over to the tug, for weight balance."

"You should go back to Asturia, Dryden. Millerna's waiting for you."

"When I see your brother again," he said, ignoring her last statement, "What should I tell him?"

She paused in the doorway. "Tell him whatever you want. If I've anything to say, I'll tell him myself, when we're both ready to hear it."

The door hissed shut behind her and it was his turn to lean on the rail, to stare down into the bay where the melefs sat, imposing even in the cool darkness shot through with little sparkles of light. He thought of secrets, of the twists and turns of fate controlled not by machines, but by the individual decisions of man, paths in the world forged through the bravery of the human spirit.

"Maybe I will go home for a while," he told the silence, and thought the sparkles of light danced in approval. "I think Millerna would like that."

**5 September 2006**


End file.
